Denial (5 page)
"I'm thirsty," she smiled.
"Be my guest." I gestured toward the stool next to mine. Without the benefit of the runway's red lights, her skin was pale, and her freckles showed. But her lips were full, and her eyes a true golden brown. She looked about twenty-five. "What's your name?"
"Tiffany."
"That your real name?"
She laughed and tossed her auburn hair. "I don't use my real name here. It's safer."
"For you, or the customers."
Before she could answer, the bartender, a bulldog of a man, came by. "How about a nice bottle of champagne for the lady?" he coaxed.
"Ginger ale is fine," Tiffany said.
"Tiffany, you love the bubbly. How about a little Freixenet?" he nodded.
"Thanks anyhow, Max," she said.
"The gentleman here wants to treat you like a lady. So order like a lady."
"Max, you're way off," I interrupted. "Not ten minutes ago I paid her to bend over and spank herself. Ginger ale sounds fine to me."
He glared at me. "You some kind of big shot? Maybe I should have your ass—"
"Look," Tiffany broke in. "I earned out at the bar an hour ago. So pour me a fucking ginger ale."
"Fuck you, too." He grabbed the soft drink nozzle. "Nice ass and you think you own the world. Maybe
I
could use a couple extra bucks in
my
pocket. Ever think of that?" He slid the ginger ale in front of her and waddled away.
"He gets five percent," she said.
"Seems like he earns it."
She shrugged her shoulders, took out a pack of Marlboros and lighted one. Her fingers were long and graceful. "How about you? What do you do?"
"I'm a psychiatrist."
"You don't look like a psychiatrist — or act like one."
"I'll take that as a compliment." I put my hand on her knee.
She swept my hand off of her. "You can't touch me," she said. "The manager watches from upstairs." She pointed across the way at a line of mirrored glass panels high on the wall. "He'll have you thrown out."
"Your guardian angel?"
"Something like that."
"I guess better late than never."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Maybe you could have used one sooner."
"Want to do me a favor? Don't get shrinky on me. OK?"
"No problem." I downed the last of my scotch. "Sometimes I lose myself and start to give a shit about people." I got up and took my seat back at the runway.
A blonde who couldn't have been eighteen yet was lying on her back with her legs spread, moving her hips like she was having sex to the rhythm of ‘Addicted to Love.’ I rolled up a dollar bill and threw it at her. She smiled at me and licked her lips. She looked a little bit like Kathy, the same hazel eyes and perfect white Chiclet teeth. I pictured Trevor on top of her and imagined her coming with that bastard inside her. I threw another dollar at her, then got up to leave. As I was passing the bar, Max called me over and handed me a folded up napkin. "From Tiffany," he barked. I handed him my last ten-dollar bill and walked out.
I unfolded the napkin in the Rover. She had written the name Rachel and her beeper number. You just never know with people. I stuffed it in my pocket and started the car. As I was leaving the parking lot, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Trevor Lucas’ red Ferrari pulling in — or thought I saw it. But tootie combined with booze can play tricks with your mind.
I drove home and swallowed three Valium before heading for bed. One used to keep the nightmares at bay, but no longer. I lay there, stiff, unwilling to let go the reins of my mind. It seemed an hour passed before the competition between sedatives and stimulants for my brain's chemical receptors finally wrenched me into a realm midway between sleep and wakefulness. In that purgatory, praying that I would be saved, I heard myself wonder again how a man violent enough to butcher a woman could force himself on her so gently as to not bruise a tissue nor tear a membrane of her softest part.
Wednesday, 2:38
A.M.
I sat bolt upright, my arms crossed over my face to repel the next blow. My legs pedaled against the mattress until I was crouched against the headboard, rocking like a child. My eyes scoured the dark room, knowing the dream was over, but still smelling the mixture of alcohol and tobacco on my father's breath. My nose burned, and my jaw ached from grinding my teeth. My mouth was painfully dry.
I turned on the lamp. I hadn't changed for bed and was still wearing my boots. The odor of scotch and smoke I had smelled was wafting off me, no one else. I struggled to my feet, stripped and went for a drink from the bathroom faucet. The cold water made my teeth ache, but soothed my mouth and throat. I lighted a Marlboro from the package in the medicine cabinet and sat down in the wing-back chair by the bed. I felt anxious and empty. Raw.
How much more stable was I, really, than a man like Westmoreland? On the surface, as a physician, driving my Rover, living in Marblehead with another physician, I had nothing in common with a psychotic drifter. But in my heart I knew I wasn't entirely different from him. He was homeless; I was uncomfortable in my own home, even in my own skin. He was plagued by voices and visions; I was tortured by memories that chased me out of sleep and into the haze of drugs. How much and what kind of pain, I wondered, would it take to push me over the edge of sanity?
More than a third of the thirty-six hours Emma Hancock had given me had passed, and I didn't know a whole lot more about Westmoreland than when I'd started.
I was about to pour myself a scotch when the phone rang. I figured it was Kathy and I wasn't sure whether to pick it up or let her wonder where the hell I was. There is a scene at the end of
The Verdict
where Paul Newman lets the phone ring, sensing his deceitful ex-lover is calling, and I tried to do the same thing. But I'm no Paul Newman and I really wanted to talk to her. "Clevenger," I answered.
"Got it!" the voice at the other end said.
"Hello?"
"I got it."
"Paulson, do you know it's three o'clock in the morning?"
"Didn't you hear me? I said, ‘I got it.’"
He sounded like a maniac patient. "Calm down. What the hell have you got?"
"Ready?"
"I've got nothing else on my agenda right now."
"OK. Here goes. You listening?"
"Paulson..."
He was chuckling. "It was simple, that's why it was complex. Like anything worth a damn in science. It was hard to see because it was right in front of my face. Until I had this dream. I can tell you because you're a shrink, so I know there's not a lot you haven't heard before. Remember how Malloy, that prick, said Sarah was hot, even though she was dead?"
"Sure."
"Well, I must have filed that away somewhere. And I guess he was right because I... well... I took advantage of her in the lab. I made love to her after the autopsy."
"In your dream?"
"Of course,
in my dream
. What do you think I'm crazy?"
"Go on."
"That's it. I made love to her after she was dead. Just like Westmoreland. He didn't rape her, then kill her. He killed her and then raped her. That's why she didn't put up a fight, didn't even tighten up down there. She couldn't because she was dead."
That seemed believable. I took a drag off my cigarette.
"You there?" he asked.
"Is there a test that can prove it?"
"Nothing definitive, but I've got something that fits. Normally, involuntary smooth muscle contractions sweep semen up beyond the cervix, even in cases of rape. In Sarah there was no sperm beyond the vagina. I figure by the time Westmoreland violated her, her muscles weren't doing much more than twitching."
"Not bad, my friend. Not bad at all."
"I just don't know why I didn't think of it right away. I mean, screwing corpses isn't exactly unheard of. I've had at least one other case myself."
"You couldn't think it, only dream it."
"Huh?"
"You couldn’t entertain Westmoreland having sex with her after she was dead because you wanted her yourself. Right there on the dissecting table. Just like Malloy did. You had to suppress the whole idea. But the id is a tenacious bastard, Paulson. Take it from me."
"You're talking to a pathologist, Frank. With all the brains I've dissected, I've never found an id. If I can't see it, you're gonna have trouble convincing me it's there."
"We all rely on your concrete thinking."
"What did you think about her being shaved?"
"She looked good — a lot better than the slides you made of her fibrotic breasts."
"Well, I'm glad
you
said it." He cleared his throat. "The trouble is, I doubt all this is going to change anything for Westmoreland."
"Maybe. Maybe not."
"Last time I checked, the sentence for raping, then murdering, was the same as for murdering, then raping."
I wiped my nose and noticed a streak of blood across my fingers. "Why are you so sure he's the one who killed her?"
"I'm not. I'm not sure at all. But I'm a realist. The way Malloy and Hancock are moving on this, it might not matter — especially now, with Sam Fitzgerald involved."
Sam Fitzgerald was a forensic psychiatrist whose expert opinions varied predictably with who was paying his fee.
"What do you mean,
with Fitzgerald involved?
" I asked.
"I thought you knew. Hancock hired him on. I went down to hand over my preliminary report last night, and Fitz was just heading in to see Westmoreland. He said he'd be calling you right after he finished up."
"So much for the Sacred Heart School for Girls."
"Sacred what?"
"Nothing." I blew a smoke ring and watched it float away. "I should know by now that the straight path will only take you where somebody else wants you to go."
* * *
I needed more sleep but didn't have time for it. Luckily, I hadn't killed my supply. I grabbed my jeans off the floor, fished one of the little cellophane packets out of the pocket and sucked up what was left. Then I headed for the shower.
The warm water running over my back relaxed me. I leaned into the corner and let my face rest between the cool marble walls. Rachel came into my mind, seated on that barstool in her satin robe, open nearly to her crotch. I started to touch myself. I imagined she had let my hand linger on her leg. I separated her knees and traced the inside of one thigh with my finger. With my other hand I yanked her stool closer to mine. I could reach everything, but I was careful to stop without touching what she needed me to touch. She took hold of my wrist and urged it toward her. I let my finger brush the dampness of her cotton panties. "Please..." she whispered. I took a pinch of cotton in my fingers and pulled up on it. She gasped. I stroked the skin surrounding the cloth. I pictured her biting her lower lip and started to work myself faster. She was pleading with me. "Please, please, please..." My rhythm faltered. I pressed against the wall and closed my eyes as my body went on autopilot, expelling Rachel from my mind.
I turned into the shower stream and washed the hair back off my face. The coke was kicking in, and my thoughts were coming clearer and faster. I needed to get inside Westmoreland's head. I didn't have five years to psychoanalyze him in order to unearth the roots of his psychosis. I didn't even have the couple of weeks it would take for Thorazine to quiet his voices. Emma Hancock would never go for it, but I knew that Amytal was the only answer.
Amytal dissolves the mind's defenses and frees up traumatic memories. I'd first used it as a psychiatry resident at the Boston V.A. Medical Center. We were one of three national referral centers for the worst of the post-traumatic-stress-disorder patients, ‘treatment failures’ left over from Vietnam who'd witnessed atrocities so abominable they still couldn't remember them, let alone speak of them. The starkest evidence of what they had been through was their suicide attempts. Every other day someone was trying to off himself with whatever could be had — a plastic fork, an exposed wire, a pair of pants looped like a noose over a bathroom stall. Like surgeons lancing boils, we injected patient after patient with Amytal and listened as their suppressed horror seeped out. At least then the camouflage was stripped away; we knew the ghosts we were battling.
Giving Westmoreland an injection of Amytal wouldn't cure him of schizophrenia, but it might overcome his resistance to describing what had happened in the Lynn woods.
I turned off the hot water and held my breath. Whenever Kathy and I showered together, we'd make a contest of who could stand the cold spray longer. She almost always won because her pain threshold was much higher than mine — higher, really, than anyone I'd ever met. I've never seen her use so much as an aspirin, even the time she smacked the wall after one of my indiscretions and broken two fingers. I leaned back against the marble and tried to imagine her naked in front of me, snickering like an imp while I shivered. Where, I wondered, would she be showering this morning?
* * *
I got to the station at six-fifteen. Tobias Lucey, another recruit to the force, was on duty in the little teller's booth a the door to the lockup. He was reading the
Boston Herald
. "I'm Dr. Clevenger," I interrupted. "Mr. Westmoreland's psychiatrist."
He glanced at me, then went back to reading. "I'd need a clearance from Captain Hancock to let you in." He was wispy for a cop, and his voice had arrogance in it.
"I know you just started," I smiled. "I visit suspects all the time."
"I got no notification," he said. He turned a page.
"You think I'd come down here this early just to bust your balls?"
He finally looked me in the eyes. "Westmoreland gets no visitors. He's on special precautions. He attacked someone yesterday."